Surviving the JavaScript ecosystem updates of 2018

When I first launched the WAM website it was built using a reasonably straightforward stack of React + Babel + Webpack. That was a year or two ago and a lot has happened since then. Notably, there have also been some JS security issues, too, so we’re going to start upgrading the stack on a regular basis.

As anyone who has worked with JavaScript knows, though, that is a massive pain in the ass. Here are some notes on the upgrade process.

Upgrading Gulp

Gulp has now moved to version 4. First off, you need to uninstall any previous versions of Gulp. You then install the Guli CLI globally, and the latest version of Gulp locally.

npm install -g gulp-cli

This was a massive hassle. The uninstalls did not work and I had to manually go through the file system to get rid of the thing.

There were also some changes to the config itself. Any paths such as dest('') had to be changed to dest('.'), and all of the functions that defined the Gulp tasks had to now return, rather than just being called.

return gulp.task('name', () => { });

The way tasks were run within them has also changed. So, anywhere that used tp be ['sass'], for example, now needs to be:

gulp.series('sass')

Ugrading Node

You’ll want to upgrade Node to the latest LTS version. This includes editing the engine in your package.json file, especially if you are using Heroku.

Upgrading React

This was as simple as updating the versions in package.json and running an update. However, I did run into a problem with the React CSS Transition group, where I had to update to a drop in replacement.

This entry was posted
on Tuesday, December 18th, 2018 at 11:00 am and is filed under Programming.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.